November 02, 2005
Favorite Firefox extensions
So I just wiped my C: drive because 1) it was time, and 2) my onboard audio crapped out, resulting in massive system instability and file corruption before I figured out what was going on and disabled the thing. [Note to fellow users: the use of electrical motors e.g. fans in immediate proximity to your motherboard is most sincerely not recommended] As a result, I've had to reload Firefox and redownload all my extensions.
If you're using Firefox, you may find these useful. If you aren't, shame on you.
Here's a list of the ones I'm using:
Flashblock: replaces all Flash objects with a button so you can decide whether or not you want to watch them.
Launchy: adds options on the context menu for opening links in other applications, e.g. IE (for brain-dead sites) or Window Media, etc.
Plain Text Links: adds an option to the context menu to open selected text as a URL in a new tab. Useful for non-hyperlinked URLs.
Hotmail Tabs: lets you open hotmail messages in new tabs, something not otherwise possible.
Disable targets for downloads: prevents binary downloads from opening a blank window.
And my new favorite:
Redirect Remover: automatically removes all URL info with "redirect", linking you directly to the desired link. A much more efficient way of surfing linkdump sites that avoids sneaky and misleading redirects.
All Windows users (at least) will benefit from the following: NoAdHosts. This will disable the vast majority of advertising servers from connecting to your computer. When any page that has content from these servers attempts to load those parts of the page, it just leaves them out. So you don't have to look at the advertising, and it doesn't leave large blank areas of the screen that will still link you to the advertiser's page like simply blocking the images with Firefox's block images functionality.
--UPDATE-- NoAdHosts isn't a Firefox extension, it's a new hosts file for your operating system. This means it will work regardless of the browser you use. It works below the level of your browser and simply routes undesirable domains to localhost, where they're never heard from again. You can also edit the file yourself to filter out any sites you don't want to have to look at.
Didn't see NoAdHosts on the Firefox Extensions page (and you know how paranoid I can be about executables). AdBlock was in the TopTen or whatever... have you compared them??
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RDS
Guess I didn't make that clear, but it isn't actually a firefox extension. It's a new hosts file for your system. AdBlock is okay, I guess, but NoAdHosts goes one step farther and routes most advertising domains to 127.0.0.1. A brute force solution, perhaps, but with its own elegance, and new versions of the file are uploaded pretty frequently.
There is a "NoAdHosts.exe" program out there somewhere, but this isn't it. This is a suffix-less file that goes in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc and, I would assume, somewhere comparable in *nix systems.
Posted by: ryan at November 3, 2005 11:42 AMYou wiped your OS because it was time? Time to switch...
Posted by: Lang at November 3, 2005 01:03 PMDid that. Switched back. I'm okay with having to reinstall every year or so if the thing will run the software I want it to run and if I don't have to constantly mess with it. Windows may suck, but it does what I want it to do with a minimum of fuss, minus hardware crashes, so I'll deal.
Posted by: ryan at November 3, 2005 01:56 PM